I'll apologize in advance for a long post and for possibly having missed some of the ideas in this post being discussed already.I'd really like to see the map influenced by time and weather. I know time has been discussed in another thread and the current idea is that 1 turn = 1 day. I dislike that idea and would like to propose the following:1 turn = 1 week.
This would then allow the game to actually keep track of semi-realistic time and allow such things as weather based on time of year to come into play. Lets assume that the calendar year would then be 52 weeks so each season would roughly last 13 weeks (the current week/month could be displayed someplace so players always know what time of year it is).The game could then keep track of weather and alter the map accordingly. One of the things I remember fondly from my C64 days was playing 7 Cities of Gold which had trees change in the fall/winter (Why is it no games since then actually do anything like that instead opting to fix squares as a certain terrain).Elemental could do the same, changing trees in the fall and adding snow in the winter and removing in in the spring. When snow is on the ground it would slow down movement and give bonus's to units designed for winter (imagine unleashing your horde of Winter Wolves) and possibly penalizing summer/warm units (like a fire elemental). Also in the winter time, rivers could free over allowing units to cross rivers. If the water in the game was designated as shallow/deep then the shallow waters could freeze while the deep would not so large bodies of water or fast rivers would not freeze and would still be boat navigable while shallow ones would be frozen over.The game map could further be broken into Tundra, Temperate, Tropical regions (or smaller maps could entirely take place in 1 climate region). So in Tundra environments there would be snow in 3 of 4 seasons while in temperate you'd only see snow in the winter and in tropical there would never be snow (maybe floods or reduced movement during a rainyseason).This would add a lot strategically as you'd have to decide to attack before the snow set in (reducing movement/freezing rivers/possibly penalizing skills). The game could even reduce the rate of resouce accumulation from mines/food etc in the winter.To vary the seasons a bit the game would calculate the weather 12 months out. So instead of exactly 13 week seasons, you could extend a season by a month on either side. So it would be possible to have some years have longer winters or longer springs etc. Spells could be available to forcast the turn of the seasons (reason weather calculated 12 months out)so you'd know when the seasons might change. Late game spells might be able to altar the seasons entirely in a region on the map.The other thing I'd like to see in this would be that the attacker would be allowed to select time of day (day/night) to attack. Thus if you have units (those winter wolves) designed for night you'd select to attack at night when you'd get a morale bonus and perhaps your opponent wouldn't depending on their units. This would also affect some skills like archery which would be greatly reduced in range at night when you can't see at a distance. Similarly flight would be affected since units can't see effectively to fly (unless they were bats). Once again, spells could be available to add light or darkness to the battle field. Attacking at night should also give a better chance for an ambush assuming the enemy units are designed for day.One last thing about the 1 turn = 1 week idea. This would allow realistic time tracking of a channelers life. I don't recall whether channelers can be taken from game to game (ie persistent and leveling up over the course of multiple games). But if they are, the game could start a new channeler at age 20 and have a built in death-from-natural-causes at age 70 or 80. Thus you'd have a set amount of time to *live* and achieve fame/deeds before you'd need to create another one. It also puts a upper time limit on finishing the main quest. If there is to be a meta-verse like board similar to GalCiv this end of life idea means players wouldn't waste time ending turns to increase scores. It would instead mean you'd rank based on the score you achieved over your life (which may be from 1 uber map or many smaller ones).All these things would make me feel a lot more engaged with the world itself and my character as the passage of seasons went by. That engagement was something I never got from GalCiv or GalCiv 2 because it all felt so abstract. Best of all is that it is all taken care of by the game so there isn't a lot of micromanagement needed by players.
I really like most of your suggestions. Having seasonal effects that actually effect the game, night-fighting (like in Total War). One thing I'd like to suggest is that they don't fall into the 7 days = 1 week, 52 weeks = 1 year, 12 months = 1 year. If they're going to be creating a whole new fantasy world, I'd like to see them change it around a bit. One good reason for switching things up is that it would make the passage of time a little more fuzzy - so you'd never know exactly how much time is passing, because you don't know what the conversion to our units of time are. Another is that I think it would help immersion (it would be one more little thing that makes you feel like you're part of a different world).
The one suggestion you made that I don't like is the one involving channelers and realistic tracking of their lives. For one, playing as the same channeler in multiple games, and yet starting from scratch each time, would completely break the immersion for me. Secondly, right now the plan is for the game to end when your channeler dies; but if they can die of old age then you essentially place a turn limit on the game.
Since this game isn't set on Earth a day doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours everyone is just assuming that. So the amount of time that passes in the game could theoretically be whatever you wanted it to be. That being said I like the idea of an interactive weather system and a day / night cycle. An added bonus as another thread suggested would be battles that take multiple world map turns to complete.
That would be neat to see seasons change and influence terrain and appearance.
If a channeler specializes in weather magic does that make him a:
magicianorologist
-or-
meteorician
?
I personally think that weather effects would be really cool. Like Lord reliant suggests, you could get a skill or ability as a channeler that might let you predict the weather (maybe the ones that choose the meteorician skill at the begining of the game will know what the next day's weather will be)
I see some ideas for spells too
Rain mastery > increases chance of rain in area + provides boosts to some water spells
Storm call > causes rain effect
Thunder strike > direct damage spell boosted by rainy weather
earth to mud > slows units crossing mud terrain > area effected increased by rain weather
Blizzard > causes heavy snow weather effect
freeze > has a % chance to freeze the foe solid > chance increased dramatically if in heavy snow
freezing wind > direct damage spell that does extra damage in snow
water bolt > direct damage spell that has an added freezing or slow effect when in snow, extra damage in rain
eternal night: Darkens the skies cooling the land> boost undead and certain other 'dark creatures'
light of day: holds the sun in the sky raising temperature> boosts all light and fire creatures, harms certain 'dark' creatures
the power of the sun: A unit ability that means it gains bonus during sunny days, but handicaps during cloudy , raining, or otherwise dark days
the power of the night: A unit ability that means it gains bonus during dark days, but handicaps during cloudy , raining, or otherwise sunny days
Fires of the sun: A direct damage spell that is boosted by daylight
Chill of darkness: A direct damage spell that is boosted by darkness
UPDATE: (more ideas)Dread rain: Causes the magical storms stike fear into enemies and rally support for your cause: Adds a moral effects to rain weather
fire storms: Causes rain effect with high chance of lightning strike, except the lightning does fire damage rather than electric damage (ie, fire creatures could be immune)
drout: Drys the land > removes chance of rain effect and lowers production on certain tiles.
PidgeonPidgeon,
Maybe the time tracking could be an option for those that want it or something only related to the Metaverse.
Anyway my idea wasn't to make you start again with a L1 channeler each game. I'm hoping you'd be able to take your existing one forward from game to game. At 50 years of life and 52 weeks to a year that would be 2500+ turns of life. Maybe that's not enough for very large maps and it could be doubled to 5000 (allowing the channeler to age to 120 due to magic sustaining him). Most of my GalCiv games ended in the 300-400 turn range on large maps so I might be really off on the extreme sized maps given how big they are talking for 64 bit games.
Having a finite life option acts as a timer to keep players from dawdling around too long. Again, I would prefer it be an option as opposed to a hard rule. It just gives me another reason to get vested in my channelers life to see how much he/she can accomplish in a limited amount of time.
There's no 'd' in pigeon!
I am always in favor of any feature being an option if somebody wants it, so long as it doesn't take too much of the devs' time. (Or completely go against the style of the game, such as if somebody requested for there to be a mega event where the world is invaded by Carebears, leveling all evil in their path with their Carebear Stares...)
Yeah, I understood that. But first of all, I don't see how it would work. If you've played 4 games and your channeler is still alive, and you start a new one, you're starting out with a much more powerful channeler than you would normally, but without any of the infrastructure or civilization that should come with it/enable it. It wouldn't be that hard to end up with a game where on Turn 1 all you have is a backwards band of 100 followers, but a channeler capable of destroying the world.... Likewise, if the channeler is the only thing that carries over between games (and not technology, cities, armies, etc) it would be abusable. People would likely play their first few games with a focus on improving their channeler, and then when they play their next game (probably their last with that channeler), they could just go all out. Secondly, it just doesn't make sense. One moment your channeler is the leader of a civ that has taken over the world, and the next he's sitting in the boonies in some undetermined location with naught but a ragged band of followers? So much for immersion...
That, I don't have a problem with - as an option. It'd be like in Civilization, really. You can play with a turn limit there, but I personally never do. What I am opposed to is being able to start a new game with a channeler from a previously completed game.
Weather of some sort would be swell, especially if player magic can affect it and it can affect food production, trade, construction, and combat.
As to channelers being persistent across games, I'm pretty much in agreement with pigeon-squared. It seems both a poor fit with how the game is apparently supposed to start and a potential abuse point for multiplayer folks.
I'd much rather have a game that, on the largest maps, clearly lasted a few centuries and was led by an ageless channeler. If they have potential to wreck the world, why should mere aging be a problem for them? And regardless of how time is described, if any prominent units age out of a game, it should be the heroes. That would be one way of keeping that aspect of the game fresh even at the tail end of a Ludicrous map. Shoot, if we could get a really 'epic' time system, you could end up at your Final Battle surrounded by the great, great grandchildren of the first heroes you chose to help you carve out that tiny safe haven so long, long ago.
on the subject of age the channel spends taking over the world(s)
I actually want to have a strong variable for how many turns can be expected. the difference between the different game speeds in Civ 4 makes Civ 4 such a great game, in my opinion. I love playing marathon games (1000+ turns) which I think is close to how MoM was back in the day (I always recall the game being many hundreds or even thousands of turns) but I like playing by e-mail as well, in such cases usually the games are only like 100-200 turns, because you put it on the fast speed and you basically can cover the map in 5 turns. I would never play that way in person over lan or something, but I love having the option.
it also brings up something important to how the game will be played. If the channeler is a mobile unit that can lead armies into battle, assume he isn't as worthless as the wizards in AoW (they didn't do anything in battle they couldn't do from their tower, I think) then it will be benifitial to use them. This means the wizard will be out capturing nodes and cities and such (things that normally you'd have to wait longer to get a bigger army, made easy because you have a power-house of a wizard in your ranks). This means, if killing the wizard is perma-death or even if it just pulls and MoM and sends them to the shadow-realm, err, I mean limbo.... you basically now have free raign in their turf early game, since they wouldn't have much of an army. So you charge your channeler into the enemy capital and wins the game. this means, games could potentially be rather short, and such things as age don't matter because the game won't last long enough to really fully develop the tech tree anyway if it turns out to be benifitial to hero rush somebody (i.e. warcraft 3)
Something to consider
Weather would be very cool. Well, as long as it has some in game impact. I could see bad weather definitely helping some troops types and hindering others. I can also see using magic to further weather in your favor. I can see cold/hot in particular mattering, but maybe if you're not a kingdom with any airborne creatures then a spell to create rain and fog would be to your benefit.
No need to throw in complexity for complexities sake, but if weather matches the flavor of a particular race/kingdom, like the icemen of the north or some such, then it'd be cool as something different about that race/kingdom.
That could be really cool if done well. Especially if their names and skills/beliefs reflect their heritage. It could potentially allow for some LoTR-like stories, even. That said, I'm very wary of it. Heroes dying of anything but combat puts me a little on edge, especially because of the investment of essence that they require. I mean, generals and all the other units dying in Total War often bothered me, and they didn't require any corresponding permanent investment from you. It's kind of depressing to finally get one of your generals to really shine, only for him to die soon after from old age. I don't know about you but I tend to get attached to my characters in games, but if you know they're all going to die of old age then it kind of forces you to detach yourself from them, otherwise you'll just become frustrated. So like I said, if done well it could be really cool, but doing it well seems like a really difficult balancing act.
Well, the idea that icemen would come from the north, and to gain an advantage in battle, the iceman channeler would bring forth snow and wind that would slow enemy movement , but not hender the icemen (maybe even boost the ice elemental) is the idea I like.
It could let for weather strategies to come into effect. You wouldn't want the bonus to be too great, but be viable enought that you could plan around it just like you did (or I did at least) in MoM when I would summon a bunch of sprites and cast earth to mud all over the battle field (i.e. they slowly move through mud and my sprites blow their clothes off with magic blue whatever they were)
Weather has effect in Total War (changes visability and movement... I think exceptionally hot days tire people out faster, but don't quote me on that) so I think something like that would be nice.
I'm not happy about feeling like I have to agree with you about the "difficult balancing act." But, I'm a terribly demanding computer, and my interest in something like a multigenerational line of heroes is driven by the idea of a 'truly epic' fantasy game. And given the lack of info so far (plus Stardock's lonstanding rep for responding to player feedback), your worry about losing the essence investment when the founding hero of a lineage dies is an open question. I still prefer the idea of Dead Channeler = Game Over, but I have no problem with the idea that a hero can have a successor who will inherit the essence when that hero dies.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I also get attached to 'prominent' units in my games, but I'm just getting old enough to be basically convinced that any serious claim to being 'epic' means you need multiple (or many, many multiples of) 'mortal' generations. After all, it's much easier to think of a statue in the town square as the portrait of a True and Pure Hero if that person has been dead longer than anyone around you has been alive.
King of Dragon's Pass had aging and death. Your council (heroes) were folks elevated from the populace, but they would grow old and resign or could die of various effects.
Rather than have heroes been incredibly scarce, you can go the route of a limit of heroes based on various factors (kingdom size, channeler choices, army size, etc). Then, if a hero dies you can fill that slot with a replacement. The replacement might not be as good or may have a completely different skill set, so it's not a "generic" replacement. You might find your kingdom generates a lot of really great scholars, but not as many military heroes (maybe by channeler choices or kingdom "traits") and so you may choose to treat certain types of heroes as more scarce than others.
It's a thought as I thought King of Dragon's Pass had a pretty cool implementation of heroic figures.
Sure. I could see it being a changing number that is based on several factors. One I would want to add is 'game length' so that as time went on, you could get more heroes. "war tension" or something similar would also work. Like, so that the hero cap is higher at late game than at early game.
I think it would be alright if you had something like 'great leadership' or something that you could pick at wizard creation that let you get more heroes then others. Then the number of heroes could be soft-set by a 'Hero count = high, medium, low' setting at game creation. So if the game is going to be swarms of heroes, it would be set to high. If heroes should be rare, it can be set to low. Then the channelers that focus on hero building get more heroes than say, the one that plans to focus only on summoned units, but it is still adjustable at game start.
You're making me wish I still had my discs for KoDP. All I really remember was that I liked it very, very much, but not for all that long--it somehow didn't hit my replayability sweet spot.
How did KoDP handle the calender, e.g. time per turn?
Each turn was a season, and there were 5 seasons (including the 'mystic' season or whatever it was called, where all you did was allocate your magic points).
If they actually implement meaningful weather, for a 4X game like Elemental I'd prefer multiple turns per season. If each season is represented by just one turn, you can't really work weather into your strategy very well. For example if your make heavy use of Mammoths and you want to invade your neighbor, you might wait until winter to do so. So on the winter turn, you take over an outlying outpost. Next turn, springtime! Too bad, your mammoths are only at 80% strength now, must retreat! It'd be very fidgety. On the other hand if seasons are represented by more turns, you can actually create long-term plans to utilize the seasons to your advantage. Whether each season is 5 turns or 50 turns that would still be the case, but the longer each season is in turns the more important it becomes.
I would want seasons to last several turns as well, but not weather effects. Like lets say, in winter you have an increased chance of snow effect each day, but not constant snow. In spring you have a very high chance of rain. In summer you have very low chance of rain, no chance of snow, and in autumn you have whatever is 'default' for when seasons are turned off.
I'd say botch the idea for turns being "days" or "weeks"; simply have "turns" being "turns".
Add a regional weather system, and seasons that last 24 turns each (long enough to be felt, but not so long it'd start to annoy you), and divide a year into 4 seasons (96 turns, which sounds a lot more than it actually is).
This'd allow us to have our seasons, have our sense of temporal flow (4 seasons = 1 year) while everyone can make-believe on their own how long an actual turn is, without breaking immersion (as previously stated, who's to say that this planet have a 365-day year?).
If weather is added, have it be determined by a tile-by-tile basis, turn-by-turn, with adjacent tiles having a higher probability of having the same weather as other adjacent tiles, multiplied by the number of adjacent tiles (to avoid having a completely random weather system, with a completely dry spot in the middle of a raging thunderstorm).
This is certainly along the same lines as what I was thinking, but perhaps better thought out. you are right, 24 would be more felt then 14, but why not make it something that feels like an even rounder number, like 30 (24 is a pretty oval number in my opinion not that it really matters)
I'd also want this to be a variable of course. So you can set it to be standard - 30 turn seasons, short 7 turn seasons, realistic 91-92 turn seasons... and maybe one other setting somewhere in between (or just a custom where you can type the length of seasons.
90 turn seasons would really make a big impact. It would feel like an ice age coming and goign, maybe for that super marathon games it WOULD be an ice age, lasting for 100s of turns, maybe followed by a drought or something that maybe kills crops and such. Maybe then 1000 turns of almost endless rain that brings the world to near flooding (see my submerge terra spell or whatever in the 'world destroying' spells thread)
It would be cool to have an "ICE AGE" or "DARK AGE" mode where it started cold with near constant rain and snow, and as time goes and the % of the world that is fertile and habited increases, the weather becomes better. So over the course of the 2000 turn game the world become a brighter, warmer, and generally a better place to live. The idea is that the channeler would be bringing the world back from the ice age. That would truely feel like we channelers were restoring life to a near dead world.
Some friends gave me the Children of Hurin for my birthday last month, and the volume (which includes lots of editorial content by Christopher about his father J.R.R.'s lifelong work) plus this thread leaves me even more hungry for what is probably (at the moment anyway) an impossible feature: some sort of 'geared' calendar for singleplayer mode.
I'm sure many players would not care, but there's clearly a good early faction of folks who love both wargames and epic fantasy novels. I want them happily married, but that would need some way to have a game that spanned at least a few human generations. The idea of having 'meaningful landscape features' is in there also--if you slaughter a vast army and pile the corpses in a great hill, shouldn't you eventually be able to see that hill become landscape, perhaps even a new Place of Power? Heck, even a great hero's grave should be able to work like that.
But I have no idea how a modern 'transmission' for a game calendar might work. The only thing like it I've seen is the progress through historical ages in Civ, where the turns stepped down to be shorter and shorter calendar chunks. In wishes-were-fishes land, I'd like a singleplayer mode that shifted the time/turn ratio according to context--shorter turns when combat, trade, or diplomacy are 'hot' and longer ones when things are quiet from the player POV. A nigh-impossible thing like that might also be good for seasonal effects, since war in a frozen winter (or even a serious monsoon season) is something many culture's traditionally avoided. March got its name for good reasons, after all.
I think this came up somewhere with the discussion of the age of channelers. I personally imagine the channeler to be the old seer type person who has lived many human generations, similar to elves in J.R.R's stories. He would be there at the begining, and for many generations to watch small hamlets grow into huge bustling metropolis fortresses.
Totally, perhaps there are special life-magic shrines that had to be built on old battle fields or got a bonus when doing so. I think I (unless somebody beats me there) should bring this up in the 'build a wonder' thread. Say maybe you have a great wonder built as a monument that will help the channeler focus the powers of life and death. It would have to be built on a tile where a GREAT battle has occured, or many battles proving the total deaths on a tile is 10+ living (perhaps non-fantasy or summon) beings. So the wonder will provide some sort of bonus related to the channeling of souls / raising dead.
Well I think that would match how the game would be building too. If you start the game in the frozen winter, army movement would be slow and hindered by snow. It would be about setting the foundation for the kingdom's economy. Later game, since it both will have warmed up in-game and the different factions will have their economies primed for war time. Zerg rushes don't seem to be very common in turn-based strategy games, so I'd imagine there won't be much war movement in such early games.
In agreement.
It could be kind of fun to have the weather in the game driven by the equations from chaos theory. Considering the small scale, that shouldn't bog down things too much. Then again, programming it...
In the end, if weather effects are implemented, they should be placed so that they have a noted effect upon the game, be it for resource creation, consumption or military '(de)buffs'. It also opens us up to a whole slew of weather-effecting spells. Perhaps you could create a heat wave in the middle of winter and melt the snow around your capital alone, so that your defenders have a greater advantage?
Er, apologies. I actually meant to put more than that in there! Posted it as I was being called away to breakfast, so I didn't double-check it. Fixed.
As note, I don't want to simply remove weather and seasons from the concept either. I just don't see the benefit of having turns being a specific, Earth-based length of time. A season is as long as it is, and that could be a game-balance issue later on.
I like the idea of seasons and weather. But I think the time represented in an actual turn should remain vauge. As soon as you set it to a specific time, it will feel wrong for some aspect of the game (movement, seiges, battles, building improvments, ect). If the turn length is kept rather nebulous, its more likely that you can sort of squint your eyes and suspend belief.
my two cents
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
